Intro to Lamentations

“Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old— unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us.” 
Lamentations 5:21-22 

In our last article we looked at the last New Testament book in our Bible in a Year plan, Romans. In this post, we will look at the final Old Testament book in our reading plan, Lamentations. Lamentations is a very appropriate title because it very well summarizes what this book is all about. It is a book full of laments on the state of Judah. And even if you are unfamiliar with the context or occasion for the book, as you read it you get a very clear picture of what is going on in the lives of the people. They had been exiled and the kingdom of Judah has fallen, meaning that Jerusalem and the temple had been destroyed. This would have been unthinkable in the minds of the people (4:12) because this was the city of God, and their presumption that God would not allow anything bad to happen to them gave them a false sense of security as they strayed further and further into sin.

In Lamentations, we find 5 lament psalms or prayers to the Lord, each being 22 verse long with the exception of the third which is 66 verses long. In that third chapter, the structure is very similar to the other ones of: 1) description of calamity and acknowledgment of sin 2) cry for deliverance, and 3) trust in God to hear, but the tone of this chapter is much more hopeful and the tense shifts to the personal, first person (“I”) tense.

For now, I would like for you to keep in mind one area of meditation and one area of applications as you read the laments. Firstly, let us meditate on who God is and who we are. Unfortunately, a growing misunderstanding of God is that he is just a divine Santa Claus. This sort of thinking will ultimately lead us to think of ourselves too highly. How does that play out practically perhaps in this 2019 Christmas season? One way could be that as you are doing good things (i.e. volunteering at a soup kitchen or passing out gospel tracts or sponsoring a family/child for Christmas gifts) you may think of yourself as deserving God’s blessings and deserving good things to come your way. The problem with that is that we forget that we actually are deserving of God’s justice and wrath. Nothing that we have done will ever bring God under our debt and so Lamentations reminds us that God is sovereign over all things and that He not only ordains the good, but calamity as well (3:38). Which should bring us to rejoice even more as we see how wonderfully merciful and gracious He is.

Which leads me to one simple application that we should be joyful, holy, good news spreading people. God is not a capricious and disinterested God and there will be a time of judgment for all people. And just like the lamenter challenges us to “examine our ways and return to the Lord” (3:40), those of us who have done so should go out into this world which is full of sin and calamity and show them who is their comforter, savior, and restorer. God’s love and mercy is without end (3:22), but that does not mean that He will not judge every person. Meditating on this fact should bring joy for those who have repented of their sins and placed their faith in Jesus Christ. Likewise, our desires will change and we will strive to live lives that are holy and pleasing to Him. But it should not stop there, it should give us a greater love for the Gospel and a greater urgency to tell others of what God has done through His Son, Jesus. And so as we sing our Christmas carols and we enjoy the beauty around us, let us not also forget to Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born, that he lived, died, and rose again so that sinners may become saints.

Grace and Peace,
Alex Galvez

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These articles follow the current Bible Reading plan for Overflow Ministries. If you would like to join the reading plan, simply download the plan here: Overflow Reading Plan

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